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The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

We have chosen to present in this section the text of six letters selected from amongst the 354 “Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien”, edited by Humphrey Carpenter with
the assistance of Christopher Tolkien and Douglas Anderson (1981).

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkiencovers the author's correspondence over 60 years, from 1914 to the days before
his death in 1973, at the age of 81. It includes letters written by Tolkien to
relatives or close friends (his wife, his four children, people like C.S.
Lewis), to his publishers (Stanley Unwin, then Rayner Unwin), but also to
journalists, fellow professors or writers (such as his friend C.S. Lewis, or the
poet W.H. Auden), as well as many readers asking him questions about his work.

This
book – worth many a biography! – will appeal to anyone wishing to reach a
better understanding of J.R.R. Tolkien and his creation: beyond the
story of his life, it takes the reader on a journey through the 20th
Century, from World War I to its later decades, revealing a man in all
his complexity, far from the simple image of the writer taking refuge in
his imagination, or the world-weary and isolated philologist and
academic.

We have chosen to present in this section the text of six letters selected from amongst the 354 Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter with
the assistance of Christopher Tolkien and Douglas Anderson (1981).

“I am so glad you felt that 'the Ring' is
keeping up its standard, and (it seems) achieving that difficult thing in a
long tale: maintaining a difference of quality and atmosphere in events that
might easily become 'samey'.”

“A moral of the whole (after the primary symbolism of the Ring, as the will to
mere power, seeking to make itself objective by physical force and mechanism,
and so also inevitably by lies) is the obvious one that without the high and
noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and
ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless.”

The famous poet W.H. Auden, who had reviewed The Fellowship of the Ring in the New York Times Book Review and Encounter,
had been sent proofs of the third volume, The
Return of the King. He wrote to Tolkien in April 1955 to ask various
questions arising from the book...

“Mythically these tales are Elf-centred, not
anthropocentric, and Men only appear in them, at what must be a point long
after their Coming. This is therefore an ‘Elvish’ view, and does not
necessarily have anything to say for or against such beliefs as the Christian
that 'death' is not part of human nature, but a punishment for sin (rebellion),
a result of the ‘Fall’”

“Since I came of
age, and our 3 years separation was ended, we had shared all joys and griefs,
and all opinions (in agreement or otherwise), so that I still often find myself
thinking 'I must tell E[dith] about this' – and then suddenly I feel like a
castaway left on a barren island under a heedless sky after the loss of a great
ship.”